Siegfried - the first great movie score

riting
recently about Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen inspires me to write about
another work drawn from the same epic
medieval German poem. Wagner took this as a starting point and made
very considerable alterations to the plot. In 1924 the great German film
director Fritz Lang made two silent films, Siegfried and Kriemhild's
Revenge (the two together titled Die
Nibelungen) which stuck much more closely to the original plot.
Siegfried acquires some treasure (including a magic helmet) and slays a dragon:
he helps Gunther win the warrior maiden Brunnhilde by using the magic helmet of
invisibility to aid Gunther's prowess in sports: then marries Kriemhild,
Gunther's sister. Siegfried is murdered by the scheming Hagen, aided by
Brunnhilde (who has rumbled the deception): the mild Kriemhild, furious at the
murder, embarks on a programme of revenge which leaves most of the leading
characters dead.

The two films are extremely spectacular, full of memorable images - including
the great halls, the forest (built in the studio) and a full-sized dragon - and
with convincing performances, particularly Paul
Richter (right) as Siegfried. The films are very slow paced and long,
running almost five hours together, but a rewarding experience. Of particular
interest is the musical score: silent films often had special scores composed
for the premieres and the biggest cinemas, but these were usually cobbled
together from bits of Liszt and Mendelssohn. Even well into the 1930s film music
was fairly primitive - honourable exceptions being King Kong (Max
Steiner) and the 1933 Alice In Wonderland(Dimitri Tiomkin) - until Erich
Wolfgang Korngold's symphonic scores for Captain Blood(1935) and other swashbuckling
epics completely revolutionised film
music.

For Die Nibelungen, ten
years before Korngold, Gottfried Huppertz wrote a remarkable symphonic
score, somewhat in the style of Wagner though not using any of Wagner's themes.
Though not as complex in its construction as Korngold's scores, the themes are
used in a Wagnerian manner for the various characters, and the music supports
the very slow acting and gives it an epic strength and excitement. It's a
remarkable achievement for the period: Huppertz also scored Lang's Metropolis, but his Nibelungen score
stands out as the first great film score. The two films are available on DVD*, with the original score, in
the USA; and are scheduled to be released in the UK later this year by Eureka
Video .